In warfare, there are many dangerous situations that put lives at risk. In this modern age, robots can take the place of these soldiers to keep them out of harm’s way. Robot Squad Simulator is all about this type of robot. An arsenal of four different robots is at your disposal to save the world by completing missions no one else could.

Story

The story of this game is comprised of the background story and the missions’ stories. These robots have been created to do the tasks people can’t do because of the conditions or the danger the missions bring. The biggest part of these missions are story missions. Each will have its own story in the way of a mission briefing, telling you what’s going on and what your objectives are. These missions can take place all over the world. Completing these missions will make the world a better place and will prevent a lot of casualties. For example, someone is suspected of planting bombs in a city. After he is on his escape from the cops, it will be your turn to find and stop this potential bomb threat.

Graphics

Overall, the game looks pretty awful. With very old textures, flat square bushes, and blurry terrains, this game doesn’t look good at all. The only thing that does look pretty good, is the design of the robots. These robots have much more detailed textures than everything else. They also look pretty awesome in design, so it’s noticeable that the developers spent more time in designing these robots while they neglected the rest of the world. Yes, you can’t expect everything to have 1080p textures with the Switch’s hardware but with the pricing of this game, you’d expect it to be better.

Sound

As far as we know, there’s only one track in the whole game. This does sound like music used for the genre, but one track is really meager. In the menus and in missions, you’ll hear this one track play over and over again in a constant loop of maybe a minute. Sure, it doesn’t sound bad, but after hearing it for over an hour, you’ll get annoyed by it. So in ways of sound there’s no variation at all and it could annoy you pretty fast and resulting in turning the volume down. This doesn’t matter much because you don’t really need sound to play this game.

Gameplay

Robot Squad Simulator 2017 is a robot simulator game that lets you control tactical robots to perform missions that people can’t do because of the conditions and dangers that come with these missions. As you start the game, you’ll get in the menus of the game, and these are already difficult to navigate through while you haven’t even started your first mission yet.

The missions in Robot Squad Simulator are divided in two types of missions, training and story missions. In the training missions, you’ll be taught to control your robots in an efficient way. For the most basic controls, this is easy to learn. Maneuvering these robots can be a bit troublesome as the controls don’t work as well as they should. While driving, you can tilt the left control stick to go left or right, but when you’re doing this, the robot will go slower or stop moving forward while turning. After a bit in the first training mission, you’ll be taught that you can also turn with the L and R buttons. You would think that combining moving forward with the left control stick and turning with these two buttons should fix the issue of slower movement, but no, it will still interfere with your movement. It seems the game can’t handle two different inputs at one time. Heck, sometimes, you’ll even turn left while you are pressing the button to turn right. Also going up hills or ramps can be troublesome because it will happen that it won’t move forward and you need to reverse and try again to see if you’ll move up the ramp the next time. Going downhill can also provide some trouble as you won’t always be able to stop your robot, resulting in it going for a bath in a river and sending you to back to the last checkpoint. Reversing is also a big problem as trying to turn a little bit to a side when reversing will automatically stop the robot from moving, so the best option is to align your robot in the direction it needs to reverse before doing so. On the other hand, these control issues could very well be based on reality as these robots are usually fitted with continuous tracks which won’t always do well on uneven surfaces, this is where the simulation part kicks in.

The arm has two parts that can move separately. To access the arm’s controls, you’ll need to push a button that will stop you from controlling your robot and you are limited to the use of the arm. It’s important to position yourself in the perfect spot before changing the position of the arm, or you will need to adjust both the position of the robot and the arm several times before you can do what you need to do like defusing a bomb. When talking about bombs, in the first training mission that needs you to defuse a bomb, a wooden sign will show you how to disarm a bomb. Well, that’s not entirely true because the only controls it shows is to activate your arm controls. You’ll need to position the arm close to the bomb so you can enter the defusing screen. When you enter this screen, you’ll get no explanation at all and the only thing you see is the bomb with a small symbol of a scissors at the location of the wires. It’s obvious you need to cut the wire to defuse it, but they won’t tell you how. After quite a while, we found out that you first need to press one of the directional buttons to select that symbol because no wire was selected to cut ( this was a bomb with only one wire, while others can have multiple that require you to select the right one). Then with pressing the A button, you will cut the wire. Could be handy to tell your players that before they need to spend a lot of time to figure that out. Simply said, the things you need to do in this game aren’t that hard, but the road to get there and actually knowing how to do it is the most difficult task.

The realism in this game gets real when you accidentally drive over a bomb. It will explode with nothing more than a “poof” sound and a small dust cloud while nothing gets damaged even a bit, including your robot, but the mission will end because the bomb was destroyed. You would say mission complete because the explosion was contained by your expertise of driving over a bomb. You can also get stuck often in this game by the smallest obstacles. With a few millimeters of difference in level of a floor can get you stuck in a permanent way and the only way out is restarting the whole level. Getting stuck by bumping into a bag, crate or whatever you find along the way can also cause you to get stuck with the same results, starting over again.

The story missions are where your skills will be put to the test to see if you can save the world with the things you’ve learned in the previous training missions. You will be tasked to push buttons, disarm bombs, pick up items and many other things that you can do with the four different robots at your disposal.

Conclusion

While the whole aspect of this game doesn’t sound bad at all, the game could have done a lot better. The robot controls are awful and the instructions in the training missions could be better for new players. The overworld also looks bad with textures that look very dated. Combine all this with a lot of bugs, like getting stuck by bumping into something or even a small difference in the ground’s level this makes this game hard to enjoy. The game also feels very uninspiring as you’ll be tasked to push some buttons or pick something up and drop it off somewhere else with no obstacles at all to save the day. You can’t say that the game’s totally broken but a lot of things could have been done a lot better. This ultimately makes it more of a fight against the game’s mechanics and controls rather than the actual bad guys. Simply said, If you seek a “fun” simulation game, you’re better of searching somewhere else as this game won’t provide you with that.